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When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that's exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, 'what can we do?'” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

Doe Bay is a rural environment. It’s a place where people judge others by “what you can do,” according to Brems. The area's residents, many farmers or ranchers, are largely accustomed to doing things for themselves. Sutton's idea struck a chord. "A bunch of us finally just got fed up with waiting for CenturyLink or anybody else to come to our rescue,” Sutton told Ars.

Around that time, CenturyLink service went out for 10 days, a problem caused by a severed underwater fiber cable. Outages lasting a day or two were also common, Sutton said.

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

"I think people were leery whether we could be able to actually do it, seeing as nobody else could get better Internet out here," Sutton said.

But the founders believed in the project, and the network went live in September 2014. DBIUA has grown gradually, now serving about 50 homes.

Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality we “had 700kbps sometimes, and nothing at others,” Brems told Ars. When everyone came home in the evening, “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said.

That 10-day outage in November 2013 wasn't a fluke. At various times, CenturyLink service would go out for a couple of days until the company sent someone out to fix it, Sutton said. But since equipping the island with DBIUA’s wireless Internet, outages have been less frequent and “there are times we’re doing 30Mbps down and 40Mbps up,” Brems said. “It’s never been below 20 or 25 unless we had a problem.”

Unlike many satellite and cellular networks, there is no monthly data cap for DBIUA users.

Sutton, a software developer who has experience in server and network management, says he’s amazed how rare projects like DBIUA are, claiming “it wasn’t that hard.” But from what he and Brems told Ars, it seems like it took a lot of work and creative thinking to get DBIUA off the ground.

“The part of Orcas Island we're on looks back toward the mainland,” Sutton said. “We can see these towers that are 10 miles away, and you realize, ‘hey, can't we just get our own microwave link up here to us from down there, and then do this little hop from house to house to house via wireless stuff?’”

One of StarTouch's microwave backhaul towers.

The DBIUA paid StarTouch Broadband Services about $11,000 to supply a microwave link from a tower on the mainland to a radio on top of Doe Bay's water tower. The water tank, at about 50 feet, is the only structure that’s high enough to create a point-to-point link to the mainland. It is owned by the Doe Bay Water Users Association, which let DBIUA install the radios and other equipment.

Sutton and friends set up Ubiquiti radios throughout the area, on trees and on top of people’s houses, to get people online. Sutton used Google Earth to map out the paths over which wireless signals would travel, and then the team conducted on-the-ground surveys to determine whether one point could reach another.

Flight of the drones

The rural Orcas Island has a lot of hills and obstacles that could disrupt the wireless signals, and it would have been "prohibitively expensive" for DBIUA to install its own towers. As such, many of the radios had to be installed in trees. Sutton had a solution for this as well—DBIUA would use a drone to determine whether a radio on a treetop could reach other points of the network.

Initially, the drone was equipped with a camera to determine whether the treetop could “see” the next radio in the network. Later, Sutton added radios to the drone itself so he could test the wireless signal at the treetop. When they confirmed a tree would work, “we hired the person to climb up the tree and install the radios,” Sutton said.

Most homes in the network have a radio on the roof or the side of the house that points to one of about 10 relay points, which have multiple radios for receiving and distributing signals. Relay points themselves can be on a tree, a pole, or on the side of a house.

“For some people, like me, the signal comes to my tree, and then down into my house to service me,” Sutton said.

A relay point has one radio to receive a signal and a couple more radios to send it in different directions. Each relay point is similar to the setup on top of the water tank.

A tree will generally have a box with DBIUA equipment, and Power over Ethernet (POE) cables going up the tree to the radios. POE cable also goes from the box “back to the closest power source, usually in someone’s home, and we can then provide that home a connection to the network,” Sutton explained. “In the person’s home is the power brick that puts power into the Ethernet cable,” providing electricity to the outdoor equipment. The system uses low-voltage power, with each radio requiring about eight watts.

The network uses 5.8GHz and 900MHz frequencies, and a little bit of 3.65GHz, mostly avoiding the crowded 2.4GHz band. All the connections need line-of-sight, "especially for 5.8GHz," since the higher frequencies are more easily blocked, Sutton said.

There are now about 200 radios spread throughout the coverage area, and each homeowner who pays for service has a Wi-Fi router in the home to access the Internet.

It would be interesting to see if they considered trenching fiber optic cable instead of going wireless

Possibly, but it's island terrain, quite hilly and forested in parts. I'd imagine that wireless was a lot more pragmatic given the small number of subscribers involved. And trenching for the backhaul would have required undersea burial, not really an option presumably.

I really enjoyed the article. And what struck me is how the networking knowledge is moving from being arcane to something many people in a community will be expected to know. In 10 years it will be like fixing a tractor—you may not know how to do it but there will be several people in the community who do. And it will become part of the trading economy in small communities—I'll fix your well pump when it acts up, and you'll fix my internet when it goes wonky.

(I know the area, neat community, and it is very hilly and quite remote. Fiber is really not an option.)

They are everywhere, many are thriving. Some don't offer amazing speeds, some do, but they are usually there to offer something better than the incumbents.

I'd love for an Ars "how-to" article on starting your own WISP, going into the economics and the regulatory hurdles for a small outfit that these articles hint at. Do you scale up and cover the next town over? Do you hold small and steady? What kinds of organizations are out there to help? Private companies have to be profitable in order to upgrade. Public companies have to fight all the bull being spewed from the big incumbents.

Fiber vs wireless is a great discussion as well. Some of the "bigger" WISP's will eventually do their own fiber roll outs, but it's a huge question of economics and time. Wireless can build fast and cheap and will cover a very low density population in a way that makes much more economic sense, and the technology has come a long ways from the days of yore when people putting cantennas on dlink routers and using tupperware to weatherproof their network gear. Fiber can be a maze both literally and in a figurative regulatory paperwork sense, but the costs are pretty well known and steady at this point and you are definitely future proofed with it.

I really enjoyed the article. And what struck me is how the networking knowledge is moving from being arcane to something many people in a community will be expected to know. In 10 years it will be like fixing a tractor—you may not know how to do it but there will be several people in the community who do. And it will become part of the trading economy in small communities—I'll fix your well pump when it acts up, and you'll fix my internet when it goes wonky.

(I know the area, neat community, and it is very hilly and quite remote. Fiber is really not an option.)

The article said the Doe Bay Resort has fiber. I wonder if they tried to negotiate with OPALCO as a backhaul from the resort. Seems like they could possibly get a wave on existing fiber.

They talked to OPALCO but basically the pricing didn't work out, they weren't able to get wholesale rates. I didn't touch on it in the article as it was getting long enough already, but maybe I should have... I might work in a quick mention.

I really enjoyed the article. And what struck me is how the networking knowledge is moving from being arcane to something many people in a community will be expected to know. In 10 years it will be like fixing a tractor—you may not know how to do it but there will be several people in the community who do. And it will become part of the trading economy in small communities—I'll fix your well pump when it acts up, and you'll fix my internet when it goes wonky.

(I know the area, neat community, and it is very hilly and quite remote. Fiber is really not an option.)

The article said the Doe Bay Resort has fiber. I wonder if they tried to negotiate with OPALCO as a backhaul from the resort. Seems like they could possibly get a wave on existing fiber.

Maybe, but the microwave vs fiber link is not the hard part of the problem. As always it is the last mile that is hard, and this is where they put their work. Hooking up all the remote houses is what is neat about their system and where all the investment was.

At the same time, the law, and the Supreme Court, recognized that a landowner had property rights in the lower reaches of the airspace above their property. The law, in balancing the public interest in using the airspace for air navigation against the landowner's rights, declared that a landowner controls use of the airspace above their property in connection with their uninterrupted use and enjoyment of the underlying land. In other words, a person's real property ownership includes a reasonable amount of the private airspace above the property in order to prevent nuisance. A landowner may make any legitimate use of their property that they want, even if it interferes with aircraft overflying the land.

..."

We are fortunate nowadays that the internet enables us to seek information without additional cost. Validity might be a problem but wikipedia is a hub of information where opposing interests do tend to battle. The information gleaned from it is more often than not in the direction of accurate.

I remember Tim Wu's Master Switch documented the earlier iteration of this - community cable TV - before legal restrictions came slamming down. People were doing awesome stuff like stringing up coaxial cables along farm fence posts and the like.

Good for these folks. The ability to set up Community Broadband networks - and other forms of publicly provided services - should be a guaranteed right for municipalities. There's no reason communities should have to sit and hope that a private ISP eventually builds out, or guarantee that they can make a profit free of "unfair competition".

Such a wonderful inspiring story. This is what people working together can do! When I tried to get our condo bldg connected, I immediately hit a wall from other owners and board members who did not see the value in bandwidth (some don't have TVs or use mobile phones, and travel spending only part of the year in their unit). I knew we could do better than CenturyLink. I talked to the Westin Building Exchange so we had line of sight to the adjacent building. I talked to Internap so we could build out the fiber from the street. We are surrounded by data centers like Digital Fortress. We have so many more options within reach. It really is about people working together.

I really enjoyed the article. And what struck me is how the networking knowledge is moving from being arcane to something many people in a community will be expected to know. In 10 years it will be like fixing a tractor—you may not know how to do it but there will be several people in the community who do. And it will become part of the trading economy in small communities—I'll fix your well pump when it acts up, and you'll fix my internet when it goes wonky.

(I know the area, neat community, and it is very hilly and quite remote. Fiber is really not an option.)

The article said the Doe Bay Resort has fiber. I wonder if they tried to negotiate with OPALCO as a backhaul from the resort. Seems like they could possibly get a wave on existing fiber.

Try reading the article. They couldn't get wholesale rates on the fiber so it was more economical to go with starlink

I love these stories! I've been working in my spare time on a new networking protocol that I hope could make these kind of projects easier. I've been trying to make Isochronous streams work well over a grid/mesh topology.

I noticed that even these projects designed by communities still rely upon a centralized star topology. Are there any efforts to make a grid/mesh work?

These are really motivating stories, getting me thinking about how our roughly 3500 household HOA could put together a network that would have enough size to leverage economies of scale, while still remaining nimble. We are in the flat rice fields outside Houston, so line of sight would be no problem.

And then I remember that I live in Texas, where the state has gone out of its way to make community Internet nigh impossible. It's a glorious reminder of the state's commitment to independence, liberty, and individualism.

On the island of Samsø in Denmark you can get "up to" 20/20 for around 7 dollars pr month all thanks to a local group of volunteers who were dissatisfied with what the normal ISPs could offer (Samsø is not big - but especially a lot of summerhouses are placed so far from the local phone central that ADSL runs painfully slow). Both the EU and the government has also supported it to some degree. Technically its based on Ubiquiti - the backbone is a 200mbit microlink from one the big ISPs.http://net4samso.dk

I really enjoyed the article. And what struck me is how the networking knowledge is moving from being arcane to something many people in a community will be expected to know. In 10 years it will be like fixing a tractor—you may not know how to do it but there will be several people in the community who do. And it will become part of the trading economy in small communities—I'll fix your well pump when it acts up, and you'll fix my internet when it goes wonky.

(I know the area, neat community, and it is very hilly and quite remote. Fiber is really not an option.)

The article said the Doe Bay Resort has fiber. I wonder if they tried to negotiate with OPALCO as a backhaul from the resort. Seems like they could possibly get a wave on existing fiber.

Maybe, but the microwave vs fiber link is not the hard part of the problem. As always it is the last mile that is hard, and this is where they put their work. Hooking up all the remote houses is what is neat about their system and where all the investment was.

You seem to be implying that my question was intended to discount the article. I was just asking what I thought was a logical question, and it resulted in the author adding the info to the article, so I don't mind that it got major downvoted.

Early in the network’s life, Sutton got an alert at 2 am that a relay point was down. An in-person investigation determined that a sheep had disconnected an extension cord that was sitting in the middle of a field.

Ubiquiti radios are terrific. I've used them to install IP cameras in remote areas where I was lucky to have AC mains, let alone working internet. And back in my community, I cancelled the almost $2,000 a year commercial Comcast service in the gate house (that controls our gate), installed a pair Ubiquiti bridges, then linked to my fiber connection at home.

I'm experimenting now on a project to provide internet to a client that's about a mile from the nearest broadband presence, again with Ubiquiti gear. A lot of things are possible, especially if you aren't too visible about it.

If it takes customers from crooked arrogant providers, I'm all for it.

Sigh. If only people in my rural location would go for it. Unfortunately, my area is full of religious nuts who believe that computers and the Internet are tools of the devil. I do enjoy making their heads spin when I tell them that their smartphones ARE computers and when they check the weather and the news, they are using the Internet.

No matter how many facts you give them, they tell me that I'm wrong. Facts and religion don't seem to mix.

1. This is really, really great stuff. The technology, the community, the project, and the reporting. I second the calls for more articles along these lines, particularly a "how to set up a community WISP" series.

2. Using a drone for site surveys is brilliant. I installed a 50ft tower at our place a few months ago (to support an Xplornet CPE7000 S-band LTE modem) and the site survey took five phone calls over six weeks, seven theodolite setups, a site visit from a (useless) subcontractor tech, and two hours of calculations to figure out the elevation needed for a reliable line-of-sight link. If I could have just suspended the signal analyzer's antenna from a quadcopter.....